


Seeing Things

by ivoryandhorn



Category: DOGS (Manga)
Genre: Backstory, Canon-Typical Violence, Developing Friendships, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-14
Updated: 2019-09-14
Packaged: 2020-11-02 05:29:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,377
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20637041
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ivoryandhorn/pseuds/ivoryandhorn
Summary: The first time Badou saw it happen, he thought he was imagining things.The second time was a year and a handful of jobs later, and he promptly learned to unsee it.The third time, there was no mistaking it.(Or: How Badou decides he doesn't need to know why Heine can do the things he does.)





	Seeing Things

**Author's Note:**

> I reread DOGS recently and thought it was interesting that Badou apparently never asked Heine about his everything, despite having worked together for years. I wanted to explore that attitude a little, and the early days of their partnership too.

The first time Badou saw it happen, he thought he was imagining things.

At a weedy seventeen, it had not yet occurred to him that, if he was going to actually make nosing around the Underground his career, he had better start packing some heat other than his lighter. Heine, at an equally weedy seventeen, had yet to learn the exact opposite lesson. So when a bunch of thugs had laughed and chatted their way past the office they were quietly rummaging around in, Heine had—instead of staying hidden—chosen to kick the door off its hinges and walk out guns blazing.

In the chaos, Badou had hastily finished searching the desk for the photos they were there to get, when he heard what sounded an awful lot like Heine snarling. He looked up in time to see Heine’s whole body jerk backwards from the left, blood flying.

But later, as they were walking out, Heine shrugged his jacket back into place and zipped it up to his chin. There wasn’t any blood (beyond the usual splatter, anyway). He didn’t seem to be in any pain. He wasn’t more or less cranky than before they’d gone into the building.

Badou wasn’t used to firefights yet. Thinking about the sound of a bullet smacking into Heine’s flesh and the sight of Heine throwing himself back into the fray immediately afterwards wasn’t something he wanted to devote much brain space to. He’d probably just imagined things.

No one got shot in the shoulder and walked away without a flinch. Right?

  


* * *

  


The second time was a year and a handful of jobs later, and he promptly learned to unsee it.

By then, Badou had learned to shoot. Heine had proven to be, to put it delicately, the most frustrating asshole Badou had ever had the misfortune to work with. He was moody, picky about jobs, and treated Badou to either snapping and snarling or a brooding silence that wasn’t much better. His only real solution to anything seemed to involve bullets and applying them to other people’s bodies. He had, as far as Badou could tell, no actual life beyond the jobs they took together—but in that, they were the same, so he didn’t hold it against the guy.

On the plus side, Heine was dependable on the jobs that he did take, which were usually the ones that required guns blazing. Admittedly, he also had a tendency to turn jobs _into_ ones that required guns blazing. But aside from that, he was punctual, covered Badou’s ass during fights in an off-handed kind of way, and never took his entire 50% cut of the pay, either. So they wound up taking jobs together over and over, even when Badou was sure the stress was going to shave off what years the chain-smoking didn’t.

This time, they were dashing through a warehouse on a mission to retrieve evidence of some stolen stolen goods. Badou was leading the way via the map he’d photographed a couple days ago while Heine fought off the guards eager to beat their asses. They were in close quarters, and the rapid chatter of gunfire that Badou was almost used to hearing around Heine by now had been replaced by much more visceral sounds, the smack of wood on flesh, steel digging through skin.

He’d sort of thought Heine only knew how to use guns. It was an unpleasant surprise to find that he was just as terrifying with a couple of knives lifted off of bodies in his hands. The snarling and laughter were much harder to ignore without gunfire, and Heine sounded like he was having fun. Badou, digging frantically through the crates in the storeroom they’d been after, wished he could unthink that thought immediately.

The noise, gradually, died down. He kept straining to hear Heine’s voice, though he wasn’t sure if he was trying to ascertain whether Heine was dead or about to come after _him_ with a knife. Which was a really shitty thing to think about the guy who’d undoubtedly just saved Badou’s ass, actually. Even so, he was deeply relieved to find the evidence they needed so they could get the hell out.

Jamming said evidence into a pocket, Badou peered carefully out of the storeroom. The hallway in the direction they’d come from was littered with blood and bodies and bits of bodies. Heine was crouched on the floor next to the door, hunched over his knees, knives dangling loosely from both hands. He did not look dead, nor did he look like he was about to come after Badou with a knife.

Badou took a careful step out. The carpet squished unpleasantly underfoot. Heine’s head snapped up, teeth (_fangs_) bared, but the expression faded once he saw who it was, leaving him looking impossibly young and confused.

Kicking Heine in the side, because Badou didn’t want to think about either of those words in conjunction with his partner, he said, “Hey. You dead?”

Heine’s usual scowl appeared, making him look a hundred times more alive. He dropped the knives and stood up. “Not yet.”

As he dusted himself off, Badou’s eye dropped to Heine’s side. His jacket and shirt gaped, sagging from gash that had torn into his back and around his ribs into his belly. The entire right half of his torso was soaked in blood from what Badou was sure should have been a killing blow. But the ragged edges of cloth only showed smooth unbroken skin.

Badou quickly jerked his eye back up and found Heine’s gaze waiting for him, crimson eyes daring Badou to say something. A shitty question rose and then died in Badou's mouth. He looked away.

“You better do something about that,” he said. “Every cop in the district is gonna think you’re a serial killer.”

Heine snorted and started walking down the side of the hallway that was not littered with corpses, heading for the exit Badou had mentioned earlier. Nice to know he listened to Badou’s attempts at planning. Sometimes, anyway.

  


* * *

  


The third time, there was no denying it.

It wasn’t really the third time. Badou had just gotten so good at ignoring Heine’s insane ability to walk out of gunfights bloody but untouched that his eye automatically skated over the bullet holes that sprouted in his clothes like weeds, and when the steam started rising, he found literally anything else to occupy his attention. He was an info broker, yeah, but here was the truth: he didn’t want to know. There was a story there, no two ways about it, but it was one that was only going to suck for Heine to tell and suck for Badou to hear. Asking about it seemed like a good way to get a bullet through something painful but non-vital. (He liked to think that Heine liked him enough to not go straight for the bullet through the head.)

But here it was. Third time, no denying. Another job, another botch thanks to Heine’s total inability to hear something even vaguely like an enemy in the vicinity and not go totally fucking nuts.

When the dust and smoke and flying bodies had cleared, it was, as always, just the two of them standing—or in Badou’s case, attempting to stand. Badou, woozy with blood loss thanks to a bullet through the leg, slumped against a wall and fumbled for a fresh cigarette. Heine, being a crazy bastard who probably just shrugged off blood loss like literally every other thing that happened to his body, was just fucking standing there with a gun in each hand, kicking a corpse thoughtfully. It was about as close to peaceful as either of them were ever going to get.

That was when the last guy that neither of them had remembered stepped out from his hiding place and pumped Heine’s back full of lead.

Heine went down like a sack of shit. Badou dropped his cigarette. He watched in frozen horror as last guy stepped up to Heine’s prone body and lined up a shot to his head, the seconds stretching like taffy.

Then, like something out of the worst zombie movie Badou had ever seen, Heine abruptly jerked half of himself up off the ground, just far enough around to fire a single round into the last guy’s head. Last guy went down like a sack of shit. Heine collapsed again like a puppet whose strings had been cut.

Badou, after getting his heartbeat after control and puffing through a number of cigarettes he was seriously going to regret later considering the current state of his personal funds, inched closer.

“Hey...Heine?” he said, trying to ignore the thread of hysteria weaving through his voice. “Get up. Come on. Heine, I’m talking to you. See, this is why I’m always saying you need to learn some teamwork. You never fucking listen. Hey. Heine.”

Heine didn’t respond.

Now that he was closer, Badou could see that Heine's entire back was bloody ruin. He thought he could see things moving in there. Organs, probably. And there was something grayish, like metal, but that wasn’t right, it wasn’t the right shape or size for a bullet. More organs. Probably.

The blood pooling around Heine stopped spreading. Steam bloomed out of his back instead. Significant parts of Badou’s brain, primarily those dedicated to maintaining his sanity in the face of life in general, started to ring the alarm as, no joke, no _fucking_ joke, the meat of Heine’s back began to knit itself back together before his eye.

It wasn’t that he hadn’t known. It was that he’d refused to see. No such luck now.

“I’m gonna fucking puke,” he said weakly, as much from the sheer fucking impossibility of the sight as from the gore. No one should have to see their partner slowly regrowing bone, and then muscle over that bone, and then, of course, skin over that muscle.

“...,” Heine mumbled into the carpet.

“Eh? What? You wanna say something, you ex-corpse?”

“I said,” Heine muttered, blood leaking out of the side of his mouth, “shut the fuck up.”

“I express concern for your well-being and this is the thanks I get?”

“Fuck off.” Heine’s eyes slid shut. He was breathing hard through his nose, in a way that said he deliberately forcing the air in and out of himself. He went quiet.

Badou also went quiet. For about three seconds. The fear that this was just some weird fluke overcame him and he seized Heine’s shoulder, rattling him on the ground. “Hey! Still with me?”

Heine swatted at him feebly. “That fucking hurts.” His face screwed up in a wince. “Though not as much as listening to you yap.”

“You got pumped full of bullets, of course it fucking hurts,” Badou snapped, though really, he should’ve figured that one out on his own. He hunched over his crossed legs, slowly smoking and watching Heine’s face, since that was _miles_ better than watching whatever the fuck it was that Heine’s back was doing.

It finished whatever it was doing quickly. The steam hadn’t even died off before Heine was pushing himself up off the ground and onto his knees, and then up onto his feet. He staggered a little and leaned into the wall with a sigh.

Badou scrambled upright. “All good?”

Heine held up a hand. He jerked forward, breathing hard, and then then most godawful coughing Badou had ever heard hacked it’s way out of Heine’s chest. Blood—well, more blood—splattered the floor, followed by what looked like a couple of very mangled bullets.

“Huh.” Heine nudged them with a boot. “Thought they all went through.”

_How can you tell?_ Badou nearly asked, before remembering that that actually, he neither needed nor wanted to know. “Can you walk?”

Heine glanced Badou up and down as he tore off the dangling remains of his shirt and jacket. They were more like scraps held on by the collar at this point, anyway. “Can _you_?”

Badou glanced down at himself. He accepted Heine’s scraps and hastily wrapped them around his grazed leg, though the bleeding had mostly stopped by now. “Fuck off.”

He looked up when he was done. Heine was watching him carefully; he seemed to be waiting for something. Badou caught his gaze, held it, and then went back to fussing at his shitty excuse for bandage. Theirs was not a partnership that required the trading of tragic backstories: he didn’t need to know why Heine was the way he was, how he could do what he could do. Just that he would, when the chips were down. And Heine had already proven that a dozen times over.

“We done here?” Heine asked.

“_I’m_ not the one who keeps getting distracted by the slightest opportunity to get up close and personal with everyone else’s bullets.”

With a snort, Heine turned and walked away, mostly steady on his feet. Badou could see a thick scar winding its way down his bare back, starting at his hairline, dipping under the bandages still wrapped tight around his neck, and then continuing all the way down to the waist of his pants. The scar was precisely placed over where his spine would be. Badou thought of something grayish, like metal, that wasn’t the right shape or size to be bullets, glinting in the meat of Heine’s body. He had no other scars: there was a constellation of pockmarks where the bullets had gone into him, but they were pink and already healing.

Badou had the rare pleasure of seeing Heine surprised when his jacket hit him in the head. “Cover that shit up. You’re going to make children cry, and guess who’s going to get stuck explaining your horror show to the moms? That’s right, me.”

Heine stared at Badou’s coat in his hands like he’d never seen a coat before. Badou, for once, got to be the cool guy who walked (limped) away. A moment later, Heine caught up, Badou’s jacket zipped up tight around his narrow frame. He was drowning in it, which ordinarily Badou would have taunted him for, but the moment didn’t seem right.

As one, they stepped out into the street.


End file.
